Unsatisfiable Desires

Modern civilization has made life much easier and more comfortable than it was in the past. Few of us go hungry for long. We buy our food at the grocery store. Our kitchens have refrigerators, stoves and sinks. If you don’t want to cook, you can have food delivered or go to a restaurant. Most of us live in comfortable homes with hot and cold running water, electricity, central heat and air conditioning. Few of us do hard labor for a living. Modern medicine and hygiene have eliminated most of the diseases that plagued our ancestors. We don’t have to worry about predators. Interpersonal violence is rare.

Most of our desires are easily satisfied. And yet, we are not happy.

If you can easily satisfy a desire, such as hunger, then it fades into the background. You still feel hunger, but it isn’t a major driver of your thoughts and actions, because it is easily satisfied. You just eat, and it is gone. We don’t experience the depths of hunger that our ancestors experienced. We also don’t experience the same joy from a full stomach. Hunger has become a minor detail of life. Desires that dominated the lives and minds of our ancestors have faded into the background.

Modern civilization satisfies the desires that are linked to survival. The human body has finite needs. It needs food, water, temperatures within a certain range, the absence of fatal and debilitating diseases, and protection from predation and violence. Given those conditions, most people will live long, healthy lives.

However, the biological purpose of life is reproduction, not survival. Survival is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We have desires that are not linked to survival, such as the desires for sex and power. Those desires are open-ended, because reproduction is open-ended. There is no ideal number of offspring, beyond which further reproduction is maladaptive. More power could always be useful to you or your offspring. So, we evolved to have desires that can never be satisfied, desires that will always drive us to act in the world.

The desires for sex and power have no theoretical limits, although there are practical limits. For a man with a healthy sex drive, it might be enough to have a harem of a hundred beautiful women, or to have sex with a different beautiful woman every day. That would bring about sexual exhaustion, and reach the practical limit of the male sex drive. However, even a man with a hundred beautiful concubines might dream of having one more. For power, it might be enough to rule the world. But maybe not. Power can always be strengthened and consolidated.

Also, sex and power are zero-sum games after a certain point. If one man has a harem of a hundred women, then some men must have no women. A man might want to have sex with a beautiful woman, but she might not want to have sex with him, making it impossible to jointly satisfy both of their desires. If some people have high social status, others must have low social status. Desires for sex and power are intrinsically unsatisfiable in the aggregate.

What does everyone in the modern world want? Fame. Since the 1960s, fame has become the standard life fantasy. Fame provides attention, power and sexual opportunities. Everyone wants to be famous, but only a few people can actualize that desire. The rest will be stuck in a frustrated state, with a wish that can never be fulfilled.

In the developed world, we have reached the limit of material progress in satisfying human needs. We have reached a level of production at which everyone’s basic needs for food, comfort and security are met. Beyond that level, most production is just used to compete for sex and power.

Modern civilization produced abundance, but it did not create a utopia of happiness. It replaced the struggle to survive with the struggle for sex and power.